


Leave It For Tomorrow

by Pardra



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X, Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Yomi AU, dad!cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23603368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pardra/pseuds/Pardra
Summary: “X, why are you crying into a bowl of cereal in my kitchen at three in the morning?”X is having a bad week, what with having to put down his Commander and the death of his best friend, and the lingering dread of what this entails. Cain is trying to avert an emotional crisis, but X isn't going to let it wait this time. Set a few hours post X1.
Relationships: Dr Cain & X
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Leave It For Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Why can I never make anything happy for this fandom? 
> 
> This is post-X1 angst. X's has emotions and Dr. Cain is very weak when it comes to X. I tried to think of the most old-fashioned name I could for Cain, so his first name is Amos.

Amos Cain had lived in his suburban house in a safe, semi-wealthy neighborhood with his wife for nigh on thirty years now. The security, both human and machine, were some of the best. So he hadn’t expected to be woken up by the sound of something or someone moving downstairs. Or he hadn’t, but his wife had. Cain rolled out of bed and crept as silently as he could to the stairs, peering down into the living room and dimly lit kitchen beyond. 

There was a dark figure moving in the kitchen. Their build was slight, almost childlike, and they were moving without the terse urgency of someone being where they shouldn’t, but trying to be quiet nonetheless. He knew with certainty that this person was a Reploid, and for a moment he feared that a Maverick had found his home, or perhaps someone angry at him for allowing the Uprising to happen. As if he’d had anything to do with it. He watched for a moment as the person retrieved something from the fridge and then from the cabinet, and then it hit him why they looked so familiar.

It’s three in the morning, he thought to himself, more worried than annoyed as he returned to the bedroom to whisper: “Just one of the cats, Ruby. I forgot to feed them last night.”

“Well go feed them,” his wife said in annoyance, more asleep than awake. “Before they come up here and start trying to eat you.”

“It would serve me right,” he agreed as she rolled over and went back to sleep. 

Then he went downstairs, taking them carefully one at a time in the darkness, dreading what he was going to have to deal with. X must have just been released from HQ because he had still been giving his report to the remaining Commanders when Cain had gone to bed five hours ago. He had joined in for the original retelling, when X recounted everything with slow meticulousness, his jaw set and his expression stubbornly firm. 

When the questions had come “can you confirm Sigma’s death with certainty?” “did you move Commander Zero’s remains?”, and X had begun to wilt and shiver, Amos had sent Signas a warning look and excused himself. He had never claimed to be particularly brave, and after Sigma he was prone to waving off anything overly stressful by claiming he felt a heart attack coming on. Having a real one would serve him right at this point. 

He paused beside the loveseat, still in the safe darkness of the living room, and watched X. He hadn’t come home with his armor on, and it likely needed repairing and was sitting in his lab. Without it, he looked small, tired, and disheveled, shoulders hunched as he walked to the table to pour an obscene amount of cereal into the bowl of milk on the table. Then the android turned and took the box back to its cabinet then sat and began eating, never once acknowledging Amos. Cain wasn’t a fool. His body language was one of exhaustion and he had a terrible case of helmet hair, half of it sticking out every which way (more so than usual) and the rest flattened to his head.

“X, why are you crying into a bowl of cereal in my kitchen at three in the morning?” He whispered urgently as he shuffled over the cold floor to the android. 

X looked up, having seen but not acknowledged him, and scrubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, the optics more of a sage grey than green. Cain could imagine him blithely dismissing warnings that his energy levels were too low.

“I just got done with the last of the debriefing.”

“Ah, I cry over paperwork, too.” Obviously, X was not crying over paperwork, but he huffed out a laugh anyway.

They sat in silence for a few moments, listening to X’s sugary cereal growing soggy. Cain knew this encounter would happen, maybe not the moment X was released from HQ, but soon. It didn’t mean either of them were happy about it. He received a message on his watch, tilting it toward him. It was from Euclid, one of the new medics, asking if he’d seen Hunter X because he’d vanished. 

“No, but I see Pax,” he messaged back, before turning back to the Reploid. 

X had his fist firmly implanted in his right cheek. The synthflesh did a marvelous job at mimicking squishiness because he could barely see his right optic now. 

“You look like you did when you were two and I told you you had to clean your room,” Cain said helpfully. X lowered his hand back to his lap. “Euclid says you’re AWOL, that you escaped from Medical, Pax, you’re a medic. Come on, what’s this about?”

“I just wanted to go home,” he muttered. “I couldn’t stand to stay there, and I know I’m not Infected. I ran the tests twice before I teleported back to HQ.”

X had fought tooth and nail against Cain to join the Hunters, to get his own quarters there—as a medic, but Sigma had had other ideas. Many, many other ideas. 

“Mm. I can see why, I’m sure it’s not the most peaceful place right now.” 

Amos watched X twitching with a restless energy he’d rarely seen in him. Only before he had revealed him as a Reploid to the world, when X was terrified everything he said and did was inhuman. Cain’s amused explanation that his agitation and stuttering only made him more human had done little to soothe his paranoia.

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing a hand down his face. “We have to find a new Reploid to be supreme Commander, we lost a ton of our best Hunters from almost every unit, and we even have to replace a couple of unit Commanders because Sigma and Vile are Maverick… and, and ¬Zero’s dead.”

And here it came. 

“I know, X.”

X went very still, fixing him with a hawkish stare. There was no panic in his unblinking eyes, only an expression Amos could only liken to hungry. “They want me to lead the 17th.”

“Ah.” Maybe it was accusing. “We had discussed a promotion, but I didn’t think they would go through with it so quickly.” 

Cain was displeased that they had done this without his input or approval given that he was one of the founding members and had, last he checked, held a position on par with that of Sigma’s. He went to type up a quick warning to Signas, only to find two missed calls and four messages. Amos flicked back to the time screen, his annoyed quelled under agitation. 

“Well, they did,” X said miserably, scooping at the last stubborn marshmallows floating in the milk of his bowl, producing a horrendous scraping noise that brought up one of the cats from the living room, her ears flicking like satellite dishes, eyes wide. Then she disappeared, escaping the noise. 

“And what am I supposed to do about it? I’m not even a good Hunter and I’m terrible at teamwork. I have trouble following orders, now I’m supposed to give them like I’m the perfect replacement for Zero?”

“You don’t necessarily have to be good at teamwork to be a leader, humans have been proving that for millennia. You’re not a replacement for Zero,” he said firmly, and then X gave him a look.

“That’s exactly what it is, in theory, though. They’re going to be disappointed,” he muttered, picking up his bowl and drinking the milk too. With that done, he looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself, so Amos tried again.

“Zero was just… naturally good at it. He was very authoritative even if he didn’t have the best social skills.”

“He had great instincts for the job,” Amos Cain agreed, settling in his chair like a coast-dweller boarding up before a hurricane. 

“Yeah, he never second-guessed himself, and he made split-second decisions, and you know I’m terrible about making up my mind,” Pax groaned, resting his face in his hands for a moment in self-pity.

He made a very sad picture indeed, hunched in the light from the strip over the sink. His hands slid through his hair and Cain saw the end of an aggressively silver-red saber burn on his wrist, the rest hiding under the sleeve of his hoodie. X’s energy was contagious; he wanted to do a dozen things at once. Cain wished X would leave some of this for the daylight, when things felt less bleak. They were both exhausted in every sense of the word and Amos was feeling tired and selfish and terrified of what was going to happen.

Cain gripped the underside of his chair. “I know you aren’t, you worked as my assistant for years. So I’m going to make a decision for you, and that’s that you should go to bed. It’s three and it’s not going to do you any good to have Ruby find you passed out in her kitchen floor because you tried to solve all the world’s problems.”

Again.

It was as if he’d been waiting for Cain to tell him what to do. Wordlessly, X got up and put his bowl and spoon in the dishwasher and then turned as if to walk past him and up the stairs. The android paused near him and shuffled restlessly.

“…I miss him, Dad.”

“I know. I’ll miss him, too, X.” 

X’s first true friend; Sigma had been family. Curse whatever disease had taken hold of Sigma and the others. Cain thought he would burst with the injustice of it all. 

“Why did it have to be them?” X whispered, voice wavering, and Cain was utterly under-prepared for X’s emotions as usual. “Why did this have to happen? Sigma was so good and Zero was so strong—”

He broke off, and Cain nearly fell out of the chair in his haste to rise and gather the slim android in his arms. “Oh, X, if I knew, I would tell you. We Reploids would have to suffer from such human things. I suppose life is just a bitch, no matter what race you are.”

X’s arms slipped around him, clinging and desperate, his tears hot against Cain’s neck. “I didn’t either. It’s stupid, I never—never thought I’d have to worry about them dying. About them getting sick.”

“I know, I didn’t either,” he said, wondering if it was something faulty in his programming. 

There were plenty of people saying just that--but then Zero, a Reploid of unknown make, had been the first confirmed case. And then he had recovered with no further sign of it. But surely that meant it could be fixed, without having to put down all the Infected like rabid animals. 

“We’ll fix it, I promise. We’ll find some way to fix it.”

“How long will it take? How many more are going to have to die?” X asked bitterly, a demand that Cain doubted was aimed at him. 

“We’ll cure it.” He knew it was only a matter of time before he or X found some solution out of sheer tenacity.

But X had gone still in his arms, and Amos dreaded the next time he’d open his mouth. Then the question came, small-voiced, slimy and insidious. “What if it’s me? What if tomorrow I wake up and I’m not myself anymore?”

“Then I’ll stuff you back in that capsule where I found you and I’ll find the damn cure by myself,” he growled. 

Not X, anyone but X.

He didn’t think either of them were fully convinced, but X accepted his attempts to soothe him again, rubbing a hand up and down the android’s spine, marveling at the feel of individual vertebra and yielding synthmuscles and warmth. The thought of Pax like that, being put down like Sigma, made him feel viscerally ill.

“…Thank you,” X muttered into his shoulder. He was going to have to change his shirt, but he didn’t mind.

“Enough of this. You’re tired, I’m tired, and you need to get some rest,” he said gruffly, finally taking a step away for fear they would be down here all night.

He didn’t feel like resting, he felt like screaming, and raging, and wracking every bit of available data to work on a cure. But he was tired, and X was tired, he could see it in his shoulders, and the greyish cast to his eyes.

“I’ll agree to that,” X said with a sigh and turned to mount the stairs with more grace than Cain had ever had in his life. 

Amos followed behind, more slowly due to joints and weight, but the wooden boards creaked accusingly all the same, sounding out in protest. He was almost at the top when he heard Ruby hissing his name from their bedroom. He hurried back to the doorway before she could call the police and reassured her it was him.

“Did you take care of the cat, Amos?” She grumbled at him, pulling the blankets back over her after having thrown them off in preparation to attack him if need be.

“Yes, dear.”

Cain looked down the hallway as X gave a tiny, amused exhalation and vanished into his room. He closed the door and crossed the rug to the wardrobe. As he pulled his damp shirt over his head, he thought again about messaging Signas, but dismissed it to crawl back into bed. He’d deal with his son in the morning. 

He’d deal with all of them in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> I have two other WIPs that are even more unhappy! 
> 
> Please leave a review if the inspiration strikes. I crave them.


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